"The Power of Video" By Nick Ferrara, NJF Video Online Strategies, LLC

As a business-owner and entrepreneur, how important is video marketing? Are you utilizing videos to promote your company and services? If not, why not? Cost? Aptitude? Time? Or are you in denial that yourcompany would benefit from video marketing. Let’s first dispel that myth about your company not benefiting from video. Unless you have a license to print money, you can always use more business, right? And if you need more business, then you need to tell your story to as many people as possible, correct? Branding is important, too? Creating a corporate culture and corporate identity are fundamental in differentiating from the throngs of others who do and sell the same things as you.

Video is one of the best devices to address all these core marketing needs. And more. Video is multi-sensory, and if done well, can evoke an emotionally positive and powerful response and emotions from your audience. It’s entertaining and educational all at once. Remember in grade school how much we enjoyed when the teacher wheeled the projector into the classroom, and we knew we’d get to watch a movie? Why? Because the “movie” had a way of engaging all our senses in a way that a teacher or a text book couldn’t.

It’s no different for grownups today, except now everyone has the opportunity to find and create video relatively easily and very inexpensively. Everyone loves video, and everyone searches for and watches it online--so much so, that by 2016 it’s projected that 90% of all web traffic will come from online video.

Consider these mind-blowing stats:

60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day

Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month

Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube

More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years

And these are just about YouTube. There are dozens of video hosting sites. Videos can be created to show expertise. Video blogs are usually much more interesting than reading a bunch of words (I should have created a video of this article). People LOVE tutorials. You can rally support for a cause. You can ask questions and take polls. Videos are used to garner crowd-sourcing funds. Video listings on Google or Bing stick out like a sore thumb and have higher conversion rates than normal listings. Video e-mail is impressive, intimate, and much more engaging than plain email. There are literally hundreds of ways video can help elevate your brand and drive more business, and it doesn’t have to cot an arm and leg. Stay tuned for specific, cost-effective ways to utilize video in promoting your company, products and services.